Tag: test

Detego, a provider of innovative software solutions for the retail industry, will be showcasing the latest digital in-store solutions on January 13-15 at NRF 2019. Returning as a co-exhibitor on the SAP booth (#3426), Detego will display their RFID-based inventory management software and latest AI applications for retailers.

Detego has been complementing the SAP offering in fashion retail by utilizing IoT technology and providing SAP systems with real time data on item level. Exhibiting at NRF will be the Detego InStore Lean Edition, a new mobile solution for retailers, offering faster and cheaper access to the benefits of digital connectivity via an RFID based system. This solution allows fashion retailers to quickly adopt a “smart” replenishment process and carry out “intelligent” stocktakes, by starting small and scaling across the entire store network. Offered as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model with cloud hosting, retailers benefit from high inventory accuracy and consistent article availability at low cost. Detego’s software has already proven to be the most cost-effective and fastest to implement on the market with over 1500 stores running on Detego around the globe.

To complement their core product offering, Detego have also developed AI applications which benefit both retailers and consumers alike. Detego’s new digital assistant/chatbot can be used at any time on a customer’s smartphone to help provide more pertinent product information or recommendations, based on real-time data on actual availability and customer preferences. The built-in machine-learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities adapt to the ever-changing dynamics of retail, which means that results get better and better over time.

Detego has also found opportunity within AI to help revolutionize the planogram. Since the manual maintenance of the planogram per store can be enormously time-consuming, Detego’s self-learning system adapts to possibly changing conditions and continuously optimises the individual planogram per store. “By optimising the sizing profile of individual items for each store and greatly simplifying the in-store refilling process, we provide retailers with tools that make it easier for them to plan and implement optimum product presentation and thereby help them to boost their sales.” Says Michael Goller, Detego CTO.

Detailed analysis by retail tech specialists at Detego has confirmed that the average retailer’s data is only about seventy-five percent accurate when it comes to knowing exactly what inventory is actually in stock at any particular time. The problem is often compounded by retailers continually managing stock across multiple channels and increasingly having to stay on top of consumer demands for up-to-the-minute, reliable information. Detego, which has been monitoring its own chatbot service that allows consumers to engage with retailers via their smartphones, found the most common enquiries to be about stock availability. It found data inaccuracies around inventory to be most of an issue in fashion retail where ever shorter product lifecycles, fast turnarounds of stock and multiple style, size and colour combinations can play havoc with the supply chain and in-store operations.

“Customers, above all, want instant and accurate information on product availability,” says Dr. Michael Goller, CTO at Detego. “If you’re shopping for clothes, you want to be sure of getting the exact size and style you’re looking for. But many retailers fall by the wayside here – their systems might tell them that a particular size is available; yet, there’s a one in four chance that this isn’t the case.”

According to Goller, continually relying on manual processes for something as vital to the retail business as stock – usually by shutting up shop once or twice a year for store or warehouse staff to do a stock-take – is madness. And especially given that smart technologies abound, including RFID and mobile devices which ensure continual monitoring and lead to near hundred percent accuracy and operational excellence in the stores.
Research by the University of Parma in Italy has shown consistent sales increases in RFID-managed apparel stores and deduced that “RFID item-level tagging is a powerful tool for improving inventory accuracy, which is a prerequisite for both omni-channel strategies and store floor replenishment from the backroom.”1

Thanks to technology that helps increase the availability of products on the shopfloor – such as using wearable devices that rely on alerts and images to guide staff and speed up the replacement of missing articles and gaps on the shelves – the industry is starting to see a gradual shift towards more connected technologies in retail. IDC Retail Insights predicts that eighty percent of retailers are due to spend on visibility platforms powered by RFID and IoT2 over the next few years.

Fashion Retail and RFID are a perfect fit which is proved by many major fashion retail chains that have already moved to in-store RFID with excellent results. RFID makes it possible to easily identify articles and have full merchandise visibility. Successful fashion retailers go one step further and use more of the hidden potential behind real-time article transparency, laying the foundation for overcoming their greatest strategic challenges, among them omni-channel and digitalisation.

This webinar provides insights how international fashion retailers are laying the right foundation for their successful strategies, and how they use RFID as a base to differentiate in the extremely competitive segment of fashion retail.